ChadSang
12-24-2006, 05:27 PM
Chapter Four
Hell-Hole-Beaver Dam
During the days at Beaver dam, my dad always had something going to earn additional income for our family. He sold life insurance door-to-door, sold the World Book Encyclopedia door-to-door, raised rabbits to sell for meat and raised chinchillas to sell for their fur. My dad used to sneak off to the rabbit pens behind our house to smoke his cigars. My mother did not approve of smoking, so he would always indulge himself in this simple pleasure out by the rabbit pens. It always pained me to see my father kill the rabbits. To me that was like killing pets; my dad would hang them upside down on a rope and go along hitting them in the back of the head with a hammer to kill them. I always resented the chinchillas because they had a house with air conditioning and all we had in our house were fans to cool us off in hot weather.
Because we raised rabbits, they would often be on the on the evening menu. My mother would fry the rabbit meat and, yes, it did taste just like fried chicken. To this day I “ain’t afraid of eating fried chicken and dirty dancing alone,” according to Gretchen Wilson. My taste for rabbit soured one day after we came back from a trip to the coast. My mom had fried up some rabbit to take on the trip and there was some left over to bring back home. That evening at suppertime, I bit into a piece of leftover rabbit and discovered maggots. Apparently some “blow flies” had laid eggs in the meat earlier that day and the eggs had hatched into squirming maggots by suppertime.
Sometime during the early days of living at Beaver dam, someone gave me a Dalmatian dog. This dog was a super pet. We played together and were each other’s pals. One day the dog became sick and finally died of encephalitis. I was so heartbroken over losing my pal, my parents got anther Dalmatian to replace my lost pet. This dog was no replacement for the one I lost. He was so rowdy that we had to keep him chained to the clothesline because he was always tearing up something. Finally my dad got rid of him somehow. I shutter to think how he might have done that.
When I was eleven years old, on one of our vacation trips to the mountains. I saw the most loveable little dog in a pet shop in Asheville. I persuaded my parents to buy that dog for me, which they did. While we were in the mountains, we went to some friends of my parents to visit. Their house was just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. The man who lived there was old and walked with a cane. The little dog I had just acquired apparently got under the old man’s feet and he hit her with his cane. That cruel act broke the dog’s leg and she wound up with a cast on her leg. That was the first dog I had that lived inside the house. I’m surprised as hell that my dad allowed that to happen. Meanwhile, I was craving some blood from Shine. I would always be craving blood like hell when we took vacation trips, so I would self-feed. I always made the small incisions in one of my legs because I usually always wore long pants back in those days.
During the years we lived at Beaver Dam, I became possessed with various modes of dishonesty that would follow me for years to come. In addition to lying and stealing, I was also guilty of being cruel to animals. I used to shoot my little dog with a BB gun just to see her run. I still carry guilt today because of that cruel act. I’m not real sure, but somewhere between the ages of nine and 11, I became a dishonest, angry, fearful, guilty and a lonely child. These twisted parts of my character certainly played a part in my downward spiral that would last for about 25 years. All of that behavior was directed toward my parents, not other people. I would also use my BB gun to shoot at the windows on our back porch and then tell my parents that Shine Hales did the deed.
When I had the first Dalmatian, some men were working at the church one day doing some repair work. When they took off for lunch, I sneaked over to where they had been working and stole some of their tools. When they later discovered the tools were missing, they came over to the house to inquire about the missing tools. When the tools were found in a hiding place of mine I told them the dog must have taken the tools.
All I wanted to do was get out of there and go back to playing with my toy John Deere tractor. Actually the toy tractor wasn’t mine. I had stolen it from one Sunday when our family was at his house eating dinner. Many years later I bought an exact replica of that tractor, probably around 2002. When I lived in Mt. Airy, I found a John Deere toy tractor shop and I began collecting John Deere tractors and still do today. They aren’t cheap, about $45-$50 each.
One day while I was with my mom on a shopping trip in Roseboro, I stole some sort of toy from a store. Later, when my mom discovered the ill-gotten booty, she made me take it back to the merchant with the toy and apologize. Of course this was very embarrassing to me, but it really didn’t have any lasting moral affect on me.
Once, while visiting someone’s home about 4-5 miles down the dirt road, I tried to get this girl to play “Doctor and Nurse” with me. I “examined” her a couple of times by looking and touching her crotch. After a couple of times of this, she told her mother and later told me that her mother told her she shouldn’t do that anymore.
Besides loving to play with trucks and tractors in the dirt outside my home, I also liked to make models of various things out of balsa wood. One day I was inn my bedroom cutting on a piece of balsa with an Xacto knife. While cutting the wood while it rested on my right leg, my hand slipped and the sharp knife dug into my leg, leaving a wide gash about six inches long and very deep. My leg was bleeding profusely and I stayed there for some time lapping up all the blood I could. Previous to this, the most blood I had ever consumed was somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon’s worth. My leg was bleeding so much that I got my fill.
Finally, I hobbled into the living room and calmly announced to my mom and dad that I had just cut myself. My mom freaked out when she saw the very large gaping wound. They rushed me to Roseboro, to the medical clinic there, where a doctor sewed me up. He didn’t do a very good job because that scar that was left was about a half-inch wide and six inches long. You can still see it today. The clinic people said I was very lucky because I missed cutting my femoral artery by 1/8 of an inch (beating death #3).
I encountered my first dead body while living at Beaver dam. As I mentioned earlier, we lived on a dirt road, and about once a month, a man would come by on road grader, smoothing out the dirt road. He w would always stop the road grader at our house and eat his lunch. I would go out there and talk to him while he ate his lunch. I would go out there and talk to him because I was fascinated by the big piece of machinery. One day I saw the road grader stopped out by the road, so I went out for my normal visit. Only this time, the man was all slumped over and his face was purple. He had died of a heart attack. It’s kinda weird, but seeing that dead body didn’t bother me a bit. That was the first indication that the dead did not bother me. I knew it was the people living I had to worry about.
Not only was my dad pastor of Beaver Dam Baptist Church, he was also the pastor of a small country church outside of Fayetteville, NC, in a area known as Grey’s Creek. We would travel to that church once a month when he would preach there. My mom would always make a mayonnaise sandwich and cut it into four pieces. She would give me the pieces, one by one, during church service to keep me quiet.
I became friends with a boy about a year older than me whose family attended the church where my dad preached. Each Sunday, after church, my parents would always be invited to someone’s house for lunch. Or as we called it in those days -- dinner. A lot of times, I would go home with Billy to eat dinner (lunch) and play until my parents were ready to return to Beaver Dam.
Billy exposed me to a couple of things I had never experienced. One Sunday, he convinced me to try some Beechnut chewing tobacco he had. Well, I put a big wad of that tobacco in my mouth and begin chewing. Billy didn’t bother to tell me I shouldn’t swallow the juice and the consequences of this action became real apparent when I threw up all over the dinner table right in front of his parents.
Hell-Hole-Beaver Dam
During the days at Beaver dam, my dad always had something going to earn additional income for our family. He sold life insurance door-to-door, sold the World Book Encyclopedia door-to-door, raised rabbits to sell for meat and raised chinchillas to sell for their fur. My dad used to sneak off to the rabbit pens behind our house to smoke his cigars. My mother did not approve of smoking, so he would always indulge himself in this simple pleasure out by the rabbit pens. It always pained me to see my father kill the rabbits. To me that was like killing pets; my dad would hang them upside down on a rope and go along hitting them in the back of the head with a hammer to kill them. I always resented the chinchillas because they had a house with air conditioning and all we had in our house were fans to cool us off in hot weather.
Because we raised rabbits, they would often be on the on the evening menu. My mother would fry the rabbit meat and, yes, it did taste just like fried chicken. To this day I “ain’t afraid of eating fried chicken and dirty dancing alone,” according to Gretchen Wilson. My taste for rabbit soured one day after we came back from a trip to the coast. My mom had fried up some rabbit to take on the trip and there was some left over to bring back home. That evening at suppertime, I bit into a piece of leftover rabbit and discovered maggots. Apparently some “blow flies” had laid eggs in the meat earlier that day and the eggs had hatched into squirming maggots by suppertime.
Sometime during the early days of living at Beaver dam, someone gave me a Dalmatian dog. This dog was a super pet. We played together and were each other’s pals. One day the dog became sick and finally died of encephalitis. I was so heartbroken over losing my pal, my parents got anther Dalmatian to replace my lost pet. This dog was no replacement for the one I lost. He was so rowdy that we had to keep him chained to the clothesline because he was always tearing up something. Finally my dad got rid of him somehow. I shutter to think how he might have done that.
When I was eleven years old, on one of our vacation trips to the mountains. I saw the most loveable little dog in a pet shop in Asheville. I persuaded my parents to buy that dog for me, which they did. While we were in the mountains, we went to some friends of my parents to visit. Their house was just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. The man who lived there was old and walked with a cane. The little dog I had just acquired apparently got under the old man’s feet and he hit her with his cane. That cruel act broke the dog’s leg and she wound up with a cast on her leg. That was the first dog I had that lived inside the house. I’m surprised as hell that my dad allowed that to happen. Meanwhile, I was craving some blood from Shine. I would always be craving blood like hell when we took vacation trips, so I would self-feed. I always made the small incisions in one of my legs because I usually always wore long pants back in those days.
During the years we lived at Beaver Dam, I became possessed with various modes of dishonesty that would follow me for years to come. In addition to lying and stealing, I was also guilty of being cruel to animals. I used to shoot my little dog with a BB gun just to see her run. I still carry guilt today because of that cruel act. I’m not real sure, but somewhere between the ages of nine and 11, I became a dishonest, angry, fearful, guilty and a lonely child. These twisted parts of my character certainly played a part in my downward spiral that would last for about 25 years. All of that behavior was directed toward my parents, not other people. I would also use my BB gun to shoot at the windows on our back porch and then tell my parents that Shine Hales did the deed.
When I had the first Dalmatian, some men were working at the church one day doing some repair work. When they took off for lunch, I sneaked over to where they had been working and stole some of their tools. When they later discovered the tools were missing, they came over to the house to inquire about the missing tools. When the tools were found in a hiding place of mine I told them the dog must have taken the tools.
All I wanted to do was get out of there and go back to playing with my toy John Deere tractor. Actually the toy tractor wasn’t mine. I had stolen it from one Sunday when our family was at his house eating dinner. Many years later I bought an exact replica of that tractor, probably around 2002. When I lived in Mt. Airy, I found a John Deere toy tractor shop and I began collecting John Deere tractors and still do today. They aren’t cheap, about $45-$50 each.
One day while I was with my mom on a shopping trip in Roseboro, I stole some sort of toy from a store. Later, when my mom discovered the ill-gotten booty, she made me take it back to the merchant with the toy and apologize. Of course this was very embarrassing to me, but it really didn’t have any lasting moral affect on me.
Once, while visiting someone’s home about 4-5 miles down the dirt road, I tried to get this girl to play “Doctor and Nurse” with me. I “examined” her a couple of times by looking and touching her crotch. After a couple of times of this, she told her mother and later told me that her mother told her she shouldn’t do that anymore.
Besides loving to play with trucks and tractors in the dirt outside my home, I also liked to make models of various things out of balsa wood. One day I was inn my bedroom cutting on a piece of balsa with an Xacto knife. While cutting the wood while it rested on my right leg, my hand slipped and the sharp knife dug into my leg, leaving a wide gash about six inches long and very deep. My leg was bleeding profusely and I stayed there for some time lapping up all the blood I could. Previous to this, the most blood I had ever consumed was somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon’s worth. My leg was bleeding so much that I got my fill.
Finally, I hobbled into the living room and calmly announced to my mom and dad that I had just cut myself. My mom freaked out when she saw the very large gaping wound. They rushed me to Roseboro, to the medical clinic there, where a doctor sewed me up. He didn’t do a very good job because that scar that was left was about a half-inch wide and six inches long. You can still see it today. The clinic people said I was very lucky because I missed cutting my femoral artery by 1/8 of an inch (beating death #3).
I encountered my first dead body while living at Beaver dam. As I mentioned earlier, we lived on a dirt road, and about once a month, a man would come by on road grader, smoothing out the dirt road. He w would always stop the road grader at our house and eat his lunch. I would go out there and talk to him while he ate his lunch. I would go out there and talk to him because I was fascinated by the big piece of machinery. One day I saw the road grader stopped out by the road, so I went out for my normal visit. Only this time, the man was all slumped over and his face was purple. He had died of a heart attack. It’s kinda weird, but seeing that dead body didn’t bother me a bit. That was the first indication that the dead did not bother me. I knew it was the people living I had to worry about.
Not only was my dad pastor of Beaver Dam Baptist Church, he was also the pastor of a small country church outside of Fayetteville, NC, in a area known as Grey’s Creek. We would travel to that church once a month when he would preach there. My mom would always make a mayonnaise sandwich and cut it into four pieces. She would give me the pieces, one by one, during church service to keep me quiet.
I became friends with a boy about a year older than me whose family attended the church where my dad preached. Each Sunday, after church, my parents would always be invited to someone’s house for lunch. Or as we called it in those days -- dinner. A lot of times, I would go home with Billy to eat dinner (lunch) and play until my parents were ready to return to Beaver Dam.
Billy exposed me to a couple of things I had never experienced. One Sunday, he convinced me to try some Beechnut chewing tobacco he had. Well, I put a big wad of that tobacco in my mouth and begin chewing. Billy didn’t bother to tell me I shouldn’t swallow the juice and the consequences of this action became real apparent when I threw up all over the dinner table right in front of his parents.